US commanders in Baghdad said yesterday that they were investigating an incident in which two children appeared to be used as decoys to get past an American checkpoint in a car that was then blown up with the pair still inside. The attack, which was reported to have happened last weekend in the mainly Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya, killed the children and three bystanders. It comes amid concern that insurgents are adopting headline-grabbing tactics to counter the Baghdad security offensive.

If confirmed, the incident is thought to be the first time children have been used in such a way in a suicide bombing in Iraq. However, Iraqi police sources said that since last year, three other cases had been registered in which women and children were used in parked car bombings, although they reportedly got out of the cars before the explosions.

In Baghdad, a US military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, yesterday echoed the basic details of an account of the incident given to reporters late on Tuesday by Major General Michael Barbero, an official with the Pentagon's joint staff.

He said the vehicle was stopped at the US military checkpoint, one of hundreds across the city. "Children in the back seat lower suspicion. We let it move through," he said. "They parked the vehicle. The adults ran out and detonated it with the children in the back. So the brutality and ruthless nature of this enemy hasn't changed. I mean, they are just interested in slaughtering Iraqi civilians to meet their ends."

Col Garver said it remained unclear whether the adults who triggered the bomb were captured but said further details were due to be released yesterday. He said this was the first reported use of children in a suicide car bombing in Baghdad, but that insurgents in the restive Anbar province had been using children to plant roadside bombs and act as spotters for detonation teams.

Iraqi police sources also said witnesses had described seeing two children in the car, but that the incident took place in the Shia neighbourhood of al-Shaab, not Adhamiya. They also put the death toll higher, with eight civilians killed and 28 wounded. The age of the children was not known.

Col Garver said: "We know and have said many times that insurgents are determined to find new ways of grabbing the headlines and raising their profile while killing as many people as possible."

Iraqis have also been alarmed by a wave of so-called dirty bombings using toxic chlorine.

Meanwhile, as the security crackdown entered its sixth week, Iraq's Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, said it was vital to open talks with Sunni insurgents, excluding al-Qaida, in an attempt to halt the violence. "I do believe that there is no way but to talk to everybody," he told the BBC. Apart from al-Qaida, which he said was "not very much willing in fact to talk to anybody", all parties "should be invited, should be called to sit down around the table to discuss their fears, their reservations."

Mr Hashemi, the country's most powerful elected Sunni, has been fiercely critical of the Shia-led government of Nuri al-Maliki for marginalising Sunni Arabs in the post-Ba'ath political process.

Samstag, 10. März 2007

Afghan confidence in western military forces was further frayed on Monday when a US air strike on a house near Kabul killed nine people spanning four generations of the same family.

Warplanes dropped two 2,000 lb bombs on the house in Kapisa province, just north of Kabul, hours after an attack on a nearby US base. The apparent mistake came a day after American Special Forces opened fire on civilians on a busy road in eastern Afghanistan, killing up to 10 and wounding many more.

The mounting death toll is causing an uproar in a country that has suffered many civilian casualties since US-led forces toppled the Taliban in 2001. Last December President Hamid Karzai wept as he pleaded with western troops to avoid unnecessary deaths.

Reporters at the scene of the Kapisa bombing said the bombs had pulverised the main house in a compound of five buildings. Gulam Nabi, a relative of the victims, said four children aged between six months and five years had been killed.

The US military said it had fired on the house because two men who had just fired a rocket on the US-run Nato base were seen running into the compound. "These men knowingly endangered civilians by retreating into a populated area while conducting attacks against coalition forces," said spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Accetta.

News of the bombing came as tensions were still high over last Sunday's incident in eastern Nangarhar province, when a convoy of Marine Special Forces made a frenzied escape from the scene of a suicide bomb attack.

Witnesses said the Americans indiscriminately opened fire on passersby and vehicles halted on the side of the road. The US military said its troops had fired in self-defence after coming under fire from several directions in a pre-planned ambush.

Several witnesses and provincial officials disputed that explanation, insisting that there had been no incoming fire.

Freitag, 9. März 2007

Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources.

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq. Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.

Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilise Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up - in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.

Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join US efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as repressive as possible, fomenting disorder while undermining reformers.

It is also necessary to demonise the leadership. In the west, any wild statement by President Ahmadinejad is circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. It's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says Israel shouldn't exist - but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine, calling for normalisation of relations with Israel if it accepts the international consensus of a two-state settlement.

The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless.

Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.

In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington's response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer. The following year, the EU and Iran reached an agreement that Iran would suspend enriching uranium; in return the EU would provide "firm guarantees on security issues" - code for US-Israeli threats to bomb Iran.

Apparently under US pressure, Europe did not live up to the bargain. Iran then resumed uranium enrichment.

A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system.

The Israeli army is investigating whether its troops used two Palestinian children as human shields during a house search operation in the West Bank following claims by the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem.

The use of human shields to deter gunmen from opening fire on soldiers was banned by Israel's supreme court and forbidden by the army. However the practice, in which soldiers force Palestinians to approach, enter and search buildings where they believe gunmen may be hiding, remains common.

Israelis soldiers were filmed using Sameh Amira, 24, as a human shield on February 25, during a week-long raid into the West Bank city of Nablus. Mr Amira was made to search homes in the city's casbah, or old city, during a search for wanted men and bomb-making laboratories. The casbah in the centre of the city was placed under curfew for two days and a Palestinian man was shot dead when he went onto the roof of his home.

Mr Amira's cousin, 15-year-old Amid Amira, told B'Tselem that soldiers also forced him to search three houses, making him enter rooms, empty cupboards and open windows.

An 11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush, told B'Tselem that soldiers took her from her home three days later, on February 28, forcing her to open the door of a neighboring apartment and enter ahead of them. The soldiers then took her home, she said.

In her testimony to B'Tselem, Jihan said that after the soldiers left, "I was shaking with fear. I was afraid they would kill me or put me in jail. The only thing I wanted to do was sleep. I am afraid that the soldiers will come back and take me".

B'Tselem said that it was clear from the testimonies that the soldiers believed the houses presented a risk and that they were therefore knowingly placing the Palestinians in danger.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem said that the group had written to the judge advocate-general to demand a thorough investigation of the use of human shields. "The use of civilians especially a 11-year-old is very problematic and we want the army to investigate it properly using military police rather than an internal inquiry mechanism."

In August 2002, a 19-year-old Palestinian student, Nidal Daraghmeh, was killed when troops in the West Bank town of Tubas forced him to knock on the door of a neighbouring building where a Hamas fugitive was hiding. Gunfire erupted and Daraghmeh was killed.